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3D Fingerprinting — Touchless, More Accurate, and Faster
kkleiner writes "For all the glory it gets, the fingerprint has evolved very little in the last 60 years. They’re still two dimensional. The US Department of Homeland Security and the National Institute of Justice are hoping to change that. They've given grants to dozens of companies to perfect touchless 3D fingerprinting. Two universities (University of Kentucky and Carnegie Mellon) and their two respective start-up companies (Flashscan 3D and TBS Holdings) have succeeded. Fingerprints have reached the third dimension and they are faster, more accurate, and touchless."
There is probably no scientific evidence relied upon unquestionably, that has such serious issues regarding accuracy as fingerprinting. Check this out.
What comes next is the equivalent of when police drive down the street and scan license plates. You can be walking down the street and your finger gets scanned and a cop just grabs you off the street and arrests you for unpaid parking tickets.
I'm SO glad this vital security measure will be in place.
Why are we talking about fingerprinting with these 2 words ?
Fingerprinting technology is only useful to the man, for keeping you down.
Ever since Men in black, I have been waiting for the shiny fingerprint removing sphere.
Where the hell is it! And where's my flying car.
John Q. Public doesn't have his fingerprints on file if all he has are parking tickets. Further, the larger the total fingerprint database grows, the more computationally intensive scanning random people and trying to match them will become.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
I came here to either find or make this comment. Good job. Police and prosecutors build their careers on convictions. They have a vested interest in the public believing in the infallibility of fingerprinting. I find this paragraph from the New Scientist article to be key in understanding the controversy of fingerprinting:
No one disputes that fingerprinting is a valuable and generally reliable police tool, but despite more than a century of use, fingerprinting has never been scientifically validated. This is significant because of the criteria governing the admission of scientific evidence in the US courts.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
... but now identity theft will be even more painful.
that doesn't see any real improvement over the old method? Strikes me as a solution waiting for a problem. Sometimes, the good ways are the old ways. sometimes.
Unless John Q. Public ever spent an overnighter in the drunk tank, has ever traveled outside of the country or has ever gotten a driver's license/identification card.
3D fingerprinting is really not necessary for most crime solving as those recovered from crime scenes are two dimensional.
The article did not say the price, unless I missed it, but I can say its going to be a hell of alot more than a bit of ink and a piece of paper. And what is the point? Fingerprints on stuff are already 2D, why do we need to check 2D against 3D?
This might have some use in biometrics and identifying people who have already been scanned. It doesn't seem like it could be that useful forensically since prints are left on 2D surfaces.
I (Florida) didn't get fingerprinted for my ID. I don't think I even got printed for my passport, but that might have changed now?
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Did you take an international flight into or out of the US lately? If so, you are in the database with all the "bad people".
As for computational intensity, CPU cycles are cheaper than dirt, and getting even cheaper than that by the minute.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
There's a university in Kentucky? *rimshot*
If John worked for the federal government or many state governments in ANY CAPACITY, they are on file. Jane Q Public has a far lower chance of having fingerprints on file simply because far fewer Janes than Johns serve in the military. As a college intern I worked for the Forest service. As soon as I had been there 90 days it was down to the cop-shop for printing. That put my life of crime on hold.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
This may be a great improvement for biomtric applications[1] but for comparing with prints lifted off objects at a crime scene you want flat prints.
[1] Though with a touchless system it's going to be a bit harder to make sure that's a real live finger.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Great, so all I have to do is soak my fingers in water for awhile.
> For all the glory it gets, the fingerprint has evolved very little in the
> last 60 years.
Is there a type of fingerprint that has a selective advantage? I would think you'd do better with ones like everyone else's. Perhaps after 2000 generations of CSI we'll all have identical prints.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
From TFA:
They're able to flatten a 3D surface into 2D without stretching it? Quick, somebody notify the cartographers!
I wonder if this could also help me peel an orange without tearing the peeling...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I agree that the fingerprint has likely evolved very little in the last 60 years - perhaps hundreds of thousands of years! However, the evolution of *fingerprinting* technology is more to the scale mentioned in the story. Or, am I being too picky?
But they all drink fine Kentucky Whiskey instead of beer as undergrads.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I worked for the DoD for about a year just a few years ago and was never fingerprinted. I was a civilian employee too, not a contractor. I did get a thorough background check though. Funny, I got one for my current private job too.
Anyway, I think your fingerprinting was a state mandate, not a federal one.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I pick my nose before I get my finger prints done, in front of the fingerprint tech. This new development is going to cramp my style.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Cali is right thumbprint for driver's license, parents supposedly got printed for passports, but when I applied fresh this year there was no fingerprint requirement.
What's the rate of false positives? If you say there aren't any, I'll know you're lying.
The correct answer is "Nobody knows, and the research to calculate it isn't allowed."
For normal finger prints this could have been calculated decades ago, but the necessary agencies have consistently refused to permit their techniques to be evaluated. (Others have said that informal estimates show up to a 20% error rate [varies with the lab and the time period...low estimate was 3%]. I think was was being investigated was false negatives, though. I don't know the study, so I can't say for sure. This was reported to be based on voluntary cooperation of the fingerprinting labs, though, so the real numbers are probably higher.)
(OTOH, the study reports may be someone's invention. I haven't seen it. I do know that there had been no official evaluation the last time I looked into the matter [a few years ago].)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Really? They fingerprint all international travelers now? I had no idea. Even if that were the case, international travelers is still far too small a subset to be randomly scanning fingerprints on the street.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
This is obviously the first killer app for the 3D laptop: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/10/14/1739214
Unless John Q. Public has a concealed carry permit or has ever worked for a bank or other institution governed by the SEC or any other number of things. There's many non-criminal reasons for John Q. Public to end up with his fingerprints in a big government database and anyone concerned about it has a damn good reason imo.
>
The correct answer is "Nobody knows, and the research to calculate it isn't allowed."
I think more correctly is that it isn't profitable. I don't know all that much about finger print analysis but there probably aren't too many methods. If someone wanted to verify / invalidate the effectiveness of these methods they could but nobody will pay them to do it and so it doesn't get done. Bureaucracy at work, isn't it a beautiful thing.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
The real question for me is, are these things less susceptible to gummi / jello fingers than 2D scanners? Seems like they would be equally susceptible, and therefore equally weak as a door lock.
Terrorism will remain a concern for the foreseeable future, and it is imperative we devise a proper means to distinguish friend from foe. The solution is, of course, a national, centralized database of 3D scans of all citizens' external genitalia. In a man's case, he would simply hold his penis up and spread his legs slightly to allow his scrotum to hang free while being scanned. In a woman's case, she would simply place one foot up on a step to allow the scanner full access.
Obviously such a system only works effectively if everyone wears chaps, skirts or kilts with no underwear. But this is a small price to pay for a little extra breeze, and a lot of security.
Interesting. Validating fingerprinting would be pretty trivial, given access to a large database of fingerprints.
Eh, we'll just build them into door handles in airports and govt buildings. Flat piece of glass on the back, slightly thicker handle to contain the camera, and you just got fingerprinted, unless you were wearing gloves.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
If you really had a DOD background investigation done in the last few years, then I'm pretty sure you got fingerprinted. The few agencies that do the background checks absolutely require them. What's your name, soc number and home mailing address? I'll pull up your file and see if they're present.
Assuming that comparison of one fingerprint to another is done in constant time, then comparing a fingerprint to a database of them is done in N time, where N is the sample size. That makes comparing all the fingerprints you encounter with the database essentially an N squared operation. Faster computers can't magically handwave away algorithmic complexity.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Yes, two international trips earlier this year. Flying out of and then back into the US each time. Not once were my fingerprints taken as far as I know. As far as I know they only subject foreigners to that. Mod parent FUD.
Remember RFC 873!
No fingerprint required for driver's license in WA.
Possibly now the answer is "isn't profitable". When I looked into it in the past accurate information would have required cooperation of the FBI and various other police groups, and many were refusing to cooperate. (I'm not sure that any were so willing. The study couldn't be done, so if any were willing to cooperate, they didn't have the opportunity.)
E.g., at that time the FBI maintained *the* database of fingerprints. But it was not available to researchers wishing to check for prints being properly recognized.
(I don't mean it assert that only the FBI had a database of fingerprints, but rather they had the only one that was generally recognized as authoritative in the US.)
Perhaps things have changed. (Computers might well cause that to happen. At the time I mention that database images weren't computerized.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Jenny Jenny
008-67-5309
Bath Ruumstahl, NY
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
Finger prints are in the cloud. Bank requires a thumb print, the Department of motor vehicles takes prints for driver's silence replacements.
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
Jenny Jenny
008-67-5309
Bath Ruumstahl, NY
Jenny I got your number.....
OK, if you have EVER been printed, then you are in the database.
But that data is subdivided into many categories. There are arsonists, murders, kidnappers, organized crime members and many other sections of the database.
This is simply for faster searching. If you have a latent print at an arson scene, it would be faster to search the arsonists section FIRST, then if you do not get a match, only then do you bother searching the rest of the database.
If every search searched the entire database, all seaches would slow to a crawl and the queue to do a search would be unbearable.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
Yes, but these are only of suspected criminals. What you want to know is the odds that two random people share fingerprint characteristics -- or rather, what are the chances that some innocent person gets framed because their fingerprints happen to match the actual criminal's.
In other words, there's a selection bias in the fingerprint database.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The selection bias is only important if there's reason to believe that it has some effect on the item of interest. In this case, the dataset would be invalid if criminals have different fingerprints than non-criminals.
Besides, there are a LOT more fingerprints in databases than those of (reasonably) suspected criminals. More than enough to show there's no criminal-related bias. As an obvious example, perhaps you've noticed that the US is fingerprinting most foreigners who cross the border?
If all else fails you go to a university campus and get a bunch of non-criminals to volunteer their fingerprints. It wouldn't take an unreasonable number to show there's nothing special about the fingerprints of suspected criminals.
Whose cool-aid are you drinking? Everybody who is not a total retard, knows how much of a useless security theater it is.
For thieves there are this incredible modern device called...I think... "gloves".
For fingerprint scanners of the current generation, you can always take the fingerprint off a mug or glass (e.g. at a coffeehouse or bar). With a simple Tesa strip. Happened exactly like that with the German interior minister.
And no matter what, you can always just cut off his/her finger, and attach it to a small pump for warm liquid. Or do the same to a fake copy of the finger. Just ask a movie makeup artist, or the guys from Mythbusters. If there's enough money in it to be worth it, there is always a way.
And why? Because it lacks the third component of "who you are, what you have, and what you know". The password.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.